Michaël Sadoun is a columnist and consultant
.
A great cliché of our time is to say that we live in what Guy Debord called “
society of the spectacle
”.
The successive confinements that we have known have not denied this transformation of society, as citizens have been able to come into contact with the world only through the intermediary of screens: their social relations are themselves reduced by this. increasingly to the observation of images on smartphones, while the continuous news channels achieve record audiences over all time slots.
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The citizen himself has thus become an expert in images, a decryptor on his own scale, so that his political orientations are born today from his analysis of political communication: he assesses the competence of his leaders in the light of the quality of their com '.
The observer is even more inclined to speak of government amateurism when he evokes a misguided advertisement or a dirty tie rather than a flouted institutional procedure.
Never had we seen so many debates about the very form of the discourse of decision-makers: how long will Macron's speech last?
What are the "
hiccups
" between the announcements of ministers?
As for companies, which have announced the cancellation of payment of their dividends or their participation in the crisis effort?
Never have the spectators been able to listen so much, never have decision-makers opened their mouths so much.
Far from having the feeling of knowing everything about the crisis we are talking about all day long, some feel cheated
The "
crisis communication
" - which the economic and political authorities have adopted in recent months - has two objectives: on the one hand, it provides information on the causes and modalities of the crisis in order to limit its impact; like those long television spots that the Ministry of Health shoots;
on the other hand, it protects the reputation of actors in the midst of the storm.
Beyond the ambiguity that exists between these two objectives - to protect but above all to protect oneself, to tell the truth while covering it, to communicate, but by communicating - one would have thought that the efforts of decision-makers to influence the debate or to put words into action would bring citizens closer to decision-making centers and give them the feeling of proximity to power.
The new media helping, the spectators that we are can almost hour by hour the agenda of the president or the ministers who appear too regularly on the sets to answer questions of which we would have become experts and which the real experts are nevertheless hard to answer.
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However, the exact opposite is happening: far from having the feeling of knowing everything about the crisis we are talking about all day long, some feel fooled, because the messages they have heard since March taste like a substitute. .
"
All that is com '
": here is a banal statement which symbolizes the divorce between the mass and the elite, recently illustrated by the documentary "
Hold-up
", whose controversy says much more about democratic mistrust than Covid-19 itself.
Far from blurring suspicion, excessive communication thickens it.
“The
more it causes, the less it can,
” wrote Régis Debray.
All great speakers know well that silence is the raw material of a successful speech, and the uninterrupted flow of information, elements of hammered languages, media posturing and tweets, ultimately results in Stéphane Fouks - great name of the communication - already called in 2005 the "
society of generalized mistrust
".
If the language of wood required at least letters and skill, some communication 2.0 impoverishes the language instead of searching it.
The most symptomatic figure of this fall of the language into the element of language is the former government spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye.
In addition to an objectively difficult context where the need to speak up combined with the uncertainty of the facts, it is the insincerity and the lack of mastery of the language that have made the spokesperson a quasi-figure. humorous on the Internet.
If the language of wood required at least letters and skill, some communication 2.0 impoverishes the language instead of searching it.
By dint of conceiving messages which have no other objectives than to spare collective passions, political discourse culminates in an infantilization which is ill suited to a crisis situation: "
I will not be able to explain to my children if he is It is normal or not to throw stones at
the police, ”says Sibeth Ndiaye later to convey her scandal over a nursing assistant molesting the police during a demonstration.
In addition to deculturation, there is the desire to “
control
one's communication”, to the point that excessive communication kills communication.
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The spectator on the lookout even ends up annoyed by the pedagogy and the word designed to speak to him without jostling him.
As such, the scandal caused at the end of May by a poster from the Martinique prefecture which illustrated the social distancing imposed by juxtaposing five pineapples between a black and a white, is quite revealing.
Everything was there, however: a certain idea of inclusiveness, a minimal language and an almost playful illustration.
Yet this poster, accused of racism, aroused an outcry that must be attributed to the growing mistrust that the citizen nourishes vis-à-vis "
official
"
images
, overworked, to which he prefers the raw and sometimes violent image of the Net.
This mistrust encourages him to all bad trials, to seek the little beast, to tend towards the famous "
conspiracy
", which is too often denounced without explaining the concrete sources.
Because the more politicians polish their language, the more they give the feeling of hiding something underneath, just as the disappearance of Jean Castex's accent makes his sincerity doubtful.
The error would be to believe that Didier Raoult does not communicate.
Like Donald Trump in his own way, he does "disheveled hair": he takes good care of his apparent negligence
The Didier Raoult phenomenon was another avatar of this communication crisis.
Doctors close to the President and familiar with the language of the government, succeeds an international pontiff expressing himself with his own banter, his simple words, without being burdened with a thousand precautions, almost ignoring the reactions he arouses.
The error would be to believe that Didier Raoult does not communicate.
As in the manner of Donald Trump, he is “
combed-disheveled
”: he takes care of his apparent negligence quite rigorously.
Let us see, however, that this wording dust off a media debate stunted by ambient susceptibility, and that it imposes its authority because it is punctual and spontaneous.
In this communication crisis which is emerging at a time of constant crisis communication, politicians will have to change their voices by accepting theirs and learn to compose their score by placing a few sighs: the permanent fortissimo symphony is exhausting the ear and irritates the audience.
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Emmanuel Macron, who wanted to be the "
master of the clocks
" by reaching the supreme function, has since yielded to the temptation of the image and no longer knows how to withdraw from the spotlight.
In a context as uncertain as ours, this need to maintain a constant dialogue with the French has sometimes forced him to utter unfortunate lies that his opponents will know how to use when the time comes.
Perhaps the head of state would have done better to stick with Confucius, for whom silence is a friend who never betrays.